President Trump’s legal battles and threats of future litigation for allegedly defamatory coverage are forcing news outlets to make tough decisions about whether to fight them or pay multi-million dollar settlements to hopefully avoid future lawsuits or regulatory pressure. 

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in major defamation lawsuits — the primary tool available to hold news outlets accountable for publishing falsehoods — that have extracted multi-million dollar settlements from media companies for stories that caused reputational harm.

There also has been an increase in high-profile, legally dubious lawsuits that seem to be more about intimidating or punishing news outlets for critical or unflattering coverage. Mr. Trump has been accused of filing frivolous lawsuits as cudgels against his adversaries, raising questions about whether any company will decide to take the risk of standing up to him and fighting the litigation in court. 

Since Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, several media and tech companies have chosen to settle instead of taking the risk of going to trial. In December, Mr. Trump reached a settlement with ABC News to resolve his lawsuit against the network after star host George Stephanopoulos said on air that the president had been “found liable for rape.” The network agreed to pay $16 million to settle the lawsuit, even though some legal scholars argued ABC News had a good chance of winning in court because the president would have to meet the high bar of showing Mr. Stephanopoulos acted with “actual malice.”

A professor of law at William & Mary Law School, Timothy Zick, tells the Sun that some companies believe that settling is a better strategy than spending the time and resources it would take to put up a defense in court. In other cases, such as when companies face a lawsuit from the president, large media conglomerates that own news outlets and have other business interests may decide it is in their interest to settle the lawsuit so that they can be out of the president’s “glare.”

“People would rather comply even with sort of a bogus demand and get out of the way than continue to be a target of the president’s ire,” Mr. Zick said. “One way to sort of grease the wheels might be to settle, again, what would otherwise be a bogus or baseless defamation lawsuit.

“It’s hard to say for sure whether those things are happening, but they’re certainly plausible explanations for some of the decisions that have been made,” Mr. Zick said.

Mr. Trump has used other civil lawsuits to punish media companies. He filed a $20 billion consumer fraud lawsuit against CBS Inc. for its editing of Vice President Harris’ October 2024 “60 Minutes” interview, which critics say removed a “word salad” from the beginning of her answer to a question about Israel.

CBS has defended the lawsuit and tried to get it dismissed. However, its parent company, Paramount Global, is trying to complete a merger with Skydance Media, which requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the review of the deal is on hold.

As a result, Paramount’s board has begun settlement negotiations even as legal scholars have raised questions about the merit of Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, reportedly because the company believes it will pave the way for the FCC to approve the deal. Amid settlement negotiations, the non-executive chairwoman of Paramount, Shari Redstone, reportedly asked if “60 Minutes” could hold off on negative stories about the Trump administration until the Skydance deal was approved. 

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is vowing to sue Paramount if it settles. The group’s advocacy director, Seth Stern, says the CBS lawsuit and potential settlement threatens to “encourage further shakedowns of news outlets, film studios, and others who depend on their First Amendment right to say things Donald Trump might not like.” 

There may be a larger goal to the wave of defamation lawsuits. Mr. Zick notes that there is a push among some conservatives to try to overturn or scale back New York Times v. Sullivan, which extended the high bar of “actual malice” to win defamation cases to public figures. That possibility may be remote given that just two justices on the high court have explicitly expressed a willingness to take a case to address Sullivan, he said, but it is not out of the question. 

If Sullivan is overturned or rolled back, he said news outlets might “trim their sails” and stop producing “hard-hitting” investigations due to concerns that they could be found liable for defamation.

The increase in defamation lawsuits poses a question for newsrooms about how best to handle them. In defamation cases that are seen as meritless and meant to intimidate news outlets, such as those filed by Mr. Trump, some options are available to punish the plaintiffs depending on the jurisdiction, such as so-called anti-SLAPP statutes, which give defendants the ability to collect attorney’s fees from a plaintiff if a meritless defamation case is tossed out of court. 

Another method to potentially deter frivolous defamation lawsuits is for judges to dismiss them, either sua sponte or by granting motions to dismiss. Another potential remedy for judges is to sanction the lawyers who file them. Although, in Mr. Trump’s case, such sanctions do not seem to serve as a deterrent. In 2023, a Florida judge ordered Mr. Trump and one of his attorneys to pay nearly $1 million for a “completely frivolous” case against Hillary Clinton. 

In the short term, Mr. Zick predicts that news outlets will continue to face lawsuits from Mr. Trump and that they may decide that trying to “buy him off” with settlements is the best way to deal with the litigation. However, he thinks that the 47th president’s use of lawsuits and pressure from regulatory agencies will be an aberration and not a strategy used by future presidents.